In the wake of Heavenly's Space Manatee

Few people noticed when Heavenly's drummer, Mathew Fletcher, killed himself. But, says the Hold Steady's Craig Finn, it is through barely known stories such as his that the bonds betweeen fans and music can be most clearly understood

I hadn't really thought that much about Mathew Fletcher for a while. I'd first heard Heavenly's single Space Manatee on a college radio station in autumn 1996, when the DJ had introduced the song by mentioning that Mathew, who was their drummer, had taken his own life. It wasn't a particularly timely tribute – Mathew had died months earlier, in June – but Space Manatee was only released in the US in October. It sounded great, driving fast on 35W towards downtown Minneapolis. The speed, the melody, the sunshine: it was a perfect combination.

A while later, I came across a 7in copy of Space Manatee in a record store and bought it. I recorded it on to a cassette with a bunch of other singles I'd bought that month – taping the singles meant I could listen to them while I drove, not just when I was sitting in front of my stereo. So Space Manatee would have sat alongside the likes of Superchunk and Stereolab and the Grifters. As I drove around Minneapolis, listening to that cassette, Space Manatee began to bother me a little bit. It was a fun song; it was delivered with bright eyes and a smile. It made you want to hold hands, ride a bicycle, drink with friends. It was hard to imagine that someone in the band had been struggling mentally or emotionally, when the music was so blissful.

Now, I wasn't in any position to draw any conclusions about the lives of the members of Heavenly. I knew only a scrap of information about them; I had heard only a few songs. For all I knew, the rest of their music was slow and weary. And even if every song was a three-chord romp through a field of daisies, what did that really tell me about about the people who'd recorded the songs? Songs are written by people, and people have ups and downs. Even if Space Manatee had been recorded in a moment of triumph and elation, it said nothing about the next day. The nature of that relationship between the musicians who made Space Manatee and their music troubled me, at least for a while.

But then new records began filling up the racks in the store; new records started to come home with me; new records made their way to my cassettes, and Space Manatee fell out of rotation. My own band at the time, Lifter Puller, started getting taken a bit more seriously, and touring changed my relationship with records for good, as my perceptions of musicians changed. I obsessed about records less and less, and pretty much stopped buying singles.

So when I say I hadn't really thought about Heavenly for a while, I mean for 13 years, until August 2009, when I wrote the lyrics for the song We Can Get Together, which appears on the new album by my current band, the Hold Steady.

It's a song about how fans use songs to communicate with each other. It's about the way a couple, or prospective couple, can build their own little world sitting in front of a turntable, playing their favorite songs for each other. It's about how sometimes the songs we love can often say things so much better that we can. It's about how we can make these songs our own, injecting our own feelings and meanings into words and music played by someone we don't know. And Mathew Fletcher – a young man I never knew – was able to help frame my thoughts about some of what matters so much to me about rock'n'roll music.

Tad Kubler, the Hold Steady's guitarist, had written and recorded the music for We Can Get Together. I sat at my desk, listening to the melody, trying to come up with the words. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the relationship between struggle and reward. It is a concept that informed the majority of the new album. I started thinking about heaven, which Christianity deems to be the ultimate reward. I started riffing on the songs I knew that had heaven in their title, and before the evening was over, I had finished the lyrics.

Some of the lyrics nod to some classic rock staples of my youth (Meatloaf, Todd Rundgren's Utopia). Most of the other lyrics are insider winks at some of my favourite bands (Hüsker Dü, Pavement, Psychedelic Furs). But at the heart of the matter is the band Heavenly. In some ways, it was an odd choice, because Space Manatee remains the only thing by Heavenly I own: no matter that I was an obsessive record-buyer, I never became obsessed by Heavenly. I never saw them live. I never sought out their back catalogue. I'm not even sure I've ever even heard Talulah Gosh, the band that gave rise to Heavenly, and who many indiepop enthusiasts consider legendary.

When I started writing, though, Heavenly was a pretty logical thing to stumble over as I played with the word "heaven". It struck me as a perfect coincidence: I was trying to capture in words the fleeting euphoria some songs can offer us, and while Heavenly had brought me moments of joy, they had also slipped out of my memory to be placed with new bands, songs, moments of joy. When I did an internet search on them, as I wrote, I was reminded of Mathew Fletcher. His sister, Amelia, had been Heavenly's singer and would form new bands, but Heavenly ended with Mathew's death at the age of 25.

I still spend time thinking about Mathew Fletcher, his sister, and their other bandmates spending time in a rehearsal space somewhere. My version goes like this: Someone came up with the chords to Space Manatee. Someone added the lyrics. They probably took a break for a beer or cigarette break. They made inside jokes with each other. They came back and played the song even better. They added it to their live set.

At some point, they recorded the song and pressed up a single. It made its way to KUOM in Minneapolis and got played on the radio. I was driving. I heard the song. It felt great. I bought the single. It's a simple story, but a moving story as well. Mathew Fletcher and his band mates put their time, energy, and love into their art. A distant world away, this effort brought me a small bit of euphoria. This is the beauty of the relationship we have with music, the way it can bring small doses of joy into our lives.

Rock'n'roll is, unfortunately, filled with lives ended too early. But the ones that hurt the most to me are the ones that seem to barely register on the wider public consciousness. When Kurt Cobain died in 1994, his suicide made headlines and magazine covers. He was proclaimed the voice of a generation, but it seemed almost as if his life and death had come to belong to the media. I didn't feel like I or anyone I knew had a connection to Kurt. I enjoyed his music a fair amount, but couldn't find any semblance of sadness or grief when I heard the news of his passing. I still can't. Now, I have a hard time remembering that Nirvana was, at one time, an actual band.

Mathew Fletcher's music never made him famous. But his lack of fame made his death even tougher to take in some way. There was never a myth of Mathew Fletcher. He was never claimed by legions of fans. He did not fill arenas or appear on magazine covers, so it is easier to think of him as a real person. It is easier to think of a real family mourning his death. It is easy to think of the gigs not played, the songs not written, the jokes not shared. This makes his death even sadder to me. Everything about his band and music is charged with a human element that I don't feel when looking at most other records in my collection. And I wish I could play We Can Get Together for Mathew, to offer back some of the real life that I find in that Heavenly single.

We Can Get Together appears on the Hold Steady's new album, Heaven Is Whenever (Rough Trade). Amelia Fletcher's current group the Tender Trap release the album Dansette Dansette on Fortuna Pop! on 12 July.